Rant: Quit yer whinin' (QE)

[roger]

If my first venture into a non-Wintel environment is going to be on hardware practically obsolete within a year, it'll be my last.

I have a clamshell iBook which runs OSX fine. I do not perceive upgrading for several years. I have owned the computer for several years. That means that I will get at least 5 years use out of it as my primary workstation. It will then be put to good use a server of some sort. Why will your iBook be obsolete? When Jaguar comes out you will get a performance boost, which is the opposite of obsolescence. Does it matter that you don't get the full boost that other people get - as long as it does the job.

What about this scenario? Apple throttle back the accelaration in QE so that all current cards get the same opimisation, whether they have 8MB VRAM or 32 MB VRAM. All the guys with higher spec hardware would be complaining then, and rightly so. Apple have said that they will provide accelaration for certain types of cards, and it will fully utilise those cards up to 32MB. Above 32MB the cards will not be fully utilised and the user will see the maximum available accelation. However users like us with lesser cards should be happy - our hardware is being used to its fullest - great value for money in my opinion.

R.

[TellarHK]

Originally posted by roger

Why will your iBook be obsolete? When Jaguar comes out you will get a performance boost, which is the opposite of obsolescence. Does it matter that you don't get the full boost that other people get - as long as it does the job.

What about this scenario? Apple throttle back the accelaration in QE so that all current cards get the same opimisation, whether they have 8MB VRAM or 32 MB VRAM. All the guys with higher spec hardware would be complaining then, and rightly so. Apple have said that they will provide accelaration for certain types of cards, and it will fully utilise those cards up to 32MB. Above 32MB the cards will not be fully utilised and the user will see the maximum available accelation. However users like us with lesser cards should be happy - our hardware is being used to its fullest - great value for money in my opinion.

R.

See, that's the problem. With so little known about what QE and other Jaguar enhancements, other than rumor, I don't feel confident that there will be a performance enhancement for my iBook. I'm not in any way suggesting Apple throttle anything back, and thought I was pretty clear on that point. All I'm wishing was that Apple would release enough information so that I knew the performance I get would be addressed in at least some fashion.

You say it's fast enough for you, I say I'm surprised. I've had times when I was doing nothing except typing in a document, with no applications other than Word and IE running, with 192M of RAM, and I'll get 2-3 seconds of lagtime before each keystroke renders on screen. To some people the instant response will be "Get more RAM."

I could do those two tasks on Windows, Linux, and any other OS I've tried with 64M of RAM and not worry about monster slowdowns. There've been times when applications other than Word would bog down like that as well. If that problem would go away, Jaguar would be worth a few bucks for me. If it doesn't, it still may be. But I'll be able to wait a while before I get it.

And on a tangent, I don't see why Apple charges for OS updates. They're making money on the hardware and with X they're just trying to play catchup with the OS9 feature set. I'd hope they showed a little altruism toward the user base and took OS upgrades out of the income bracket. A policy of doing that would go a long way toward making Apple look more benevolent. It's too easy now to wonder if they're worse than MS for controlling the hardware as well. This is the time when they'll likely have the best chance to grab mraket share.

[roger]

You say it's fast enough for you, I say I'm surprised. I've had times when I was doing nothing except typing in a document, with no applications other than Word and IE running, with 192M of RAM, and I'll get 2-3 seconds of lagtime before each keystroke renders on screen.

There must be something wrong with your machine. I have never experienced this with mine, even in VPC. 2-3 seconds is a very, very long time for a lag. You say that you can do these tasks on Windows with only 64MB RAM - I really would not recommend using win2k or XP with 64MB RAM - very unpleasant. Linux I can believe. My machine is not the quickest, but I have never out-typed it. It takes a while to render Movies, but I am OK with that. I can touch-type as well, just to take that out of the equation.

I wasn't suggesting that you thought Apple were throttling back their products. What information would you want Apple to release? The problem is that there are lots of hardware/software configurations out there and it would be impossible for Apple to release stats on all of them. Remember also that someone recently had a go at them in the courts saying that OSX was not sufficient for G3s when a press release said that it was. If I was Apple I would be slightly reticent in releasing statistics.

I totally agree that you want to know what you are getting for your money before parting with cash for an upgrade - who wouldn't. What I suggest is wait until it is installed at a local shop that sells iBooks and see what the speed is like on a model the same/similar to your own. Remember also that the speed increase is limited to specific tasks so the perceived accelaration experienced by the user will depend not only on what you do, but how you do it to a large extent.

I will be unhappy if I decide that the extra money is not worth it (because I am already happy with my OSX) but then new applications require 10.2. We are then being forced to upgrade at a cost. I would prefer the choice, or have a free upgrade.

[dlookus]

TellarHK,

I'm sorry for the resentment you feel as a result of this thread, but something you pointed out should have been part of my point.

No one really knows what QE is going to do for them. We also don't know how much OSX will be optimized for those not using QE. I don't think there's any reason to believe it won't be. You have to understand that at the time of my original post, people were pretty much forming angry mobs because QE did not support their hardware. I feel there is no basis for such things. I think they need to wait until it's released to decide wether they should be upset or not.

I must admit I've seen OSX on an iBook 500 and was not blown away by it's speed. I would definitely like to see it be faster, but that's a seperate issue.

Just sit tight, and see what happens.

[TellarHK]

Well, I can understand how Apple might be reluctant to release too much information in light of lawsuits that they might be facing. But unfortunately, it just seems like Apple's starting to do a one-company job of the balkanization between the 'new and the old' every year that we see in the PC industry.

It's easy to hope it's only transitional, with the power ramping they're just starting to do in order to look more competitive. Unfortunately, with Apple keeping themselves so close-lipped, they're really not helping to quell any concerns.

What I'd like to hear is something pretty simple. Just something to say what kind of improvement people may possibly see on representative hardware. You say Apple has a lot of machines to keep track of, and that's true. But with the limited number of changed components in most Apple machines, they should be able to pick some of the OS X supported hardware and just use them as examples. With the iBook 500s selling as well as I recall them having done, I'd expect them to be a benchmark of sorts.

I'm hoping someone with access to one of the Jaguar betas will actually say something positive, but it's hard telling.

[.dev.lqd]

I honestly don't think people are giving OS X the credit that's due... this OS is extremely heavy when it comes to the UI... the reason is that the UI will be able to hold its own for some time to come... it's extremely scalable and extremely extensible.

I'm not certain what your problems are, but I've found the OS usable on a beige G3 with 192 mb of ram... that's amazing to me. I have plans to try it out on an older 8600 as soon as its free... I've found doing things like turning off text antialiasing can improve text rendering dramatically... especially when using OS X on a machine with little memory. Also- you might look into one of the utilities that enables screen buffer compression-- to conserve more ram... since you're using a laptop you won't be changing resolution or color depth very often (if at all).

Back to my first point... Windows 2k ran very well with only one 64MB DIMM... as long as you slimmed it down as much as you could and didn't ask too much of it. It's also doing much much less UI wizardry than OS X. Planned obscelescence isn't the term I'd use... you'll notice that so far apple has moved almost all of its products to the G4 platform... OS X has a lot of ability to take advantage of the Altivec instruction set to speed up the Quartz subsystem... your iBook can't take advantage of this.

Perhaps there is a technical problem with your system that is causing the slowdowns to be as difficult to cope with as you say it is... keystrokes are terrible things to wait for. Like I said... on lesser hardware I've had perfectly reasonable performance... I can use it to surf the web, check e-mail, and access a filemaker pro database. I do this with as few applications open as possible.

OMG... this post is getting more incoherent by the moment... i'd better hit submit...